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Devil's advocate here: You can't charge up your car when your power goes out for a few days. Wheras gas stations have generators and gas rolls in on time, supe

by maeon3 13y ago

Devil's advocate here: You can't charge up your car when your power goes out for a few days. Wheras gas stations have generators and gas rolls in on time, supercharger networks and home power drink from the same power grid. There's a word for all this: stranded and on-the-grid more than ever before. When power goes out, the city of electric cars also grinds to a halt. And heaven forbid all the people have their cars plugged in ready to charge when the grid comes back on. Does this mean I need to have a hefty 2 stroke generator with 8 gallons of gas ready to go to charge up the car when the power is out for a few days? You'd probably need a $1000 generator to provide the watts and amps.

andrewtbham 13y ago
lack of gasoline is also a problem periodically. especially during disasters like hurricanes and massive tornados.
- fancyketchup 13y ago
  Add multi-day electrical outages to the list. During the Northeast Blackout in 2003 you simply could not buy gas for several days in many places because gas pumps run on, you guessed it, electricity. Actually, I think owning an EV would make me less worried about multi-day blackouts. You can charge an EV from a gas or diesel generator or solar (or wind or...), but a gas car can only run on gas.
dak1 13y ago
What's stopping you from keeping your own generator? I suppose you'd be effectively limited to the max range of your vehicle from the generator, but if there's no power for 200-300 miles then there's probably bigger problems.
- andrewtbham 13y ago
  or better yet... lots of people are getting solar panels from elon's other company Solar City.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jusben1369 13y ago
In the 1st world I think very few people would ding you for building a business model that relied on a predictable steady supply of electricity. Non issue.
- apapli 13y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Data centers anyone?
  - dmoy 13y ago
    Data centers are supposed to have backup generators and systems in place to fuel them up should the need arise. Can't do the same for every house in a city. However I agree, building something that depends on the grid is not crazy. For example: TVs, computers, light bulbs, fridges, ...
bdegman 13y ago
I'm pretty sure the supercharges are hooked up to solar panels for power generation as well as the grid. I'm sure without the grid they won't be able to charge at full output but they should still work.
pavs 13y ago
If you going to think up worse case scenarios then I could think of few for gas-powered cars too. You can't be always prepared for every highly unlikely corner cases.
revelation 13y ago
It's a sad time when people seriously think it is easier to have deep-well pumped, shipped, refined, shipped again toxic substances supplied than electricity. Use the money you would take to buy your 2-stroke generator and invest it into a bunch of solar panels. Also, donate some money to your local power company, because power outages are not at all a common thing in the european half of the developed world.
grecy 13y ago
In the other HN thread on this announcement, chaz posted [1] about "contingency anxiety", which was an excellent post. You're doing exactly that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791114
tlb 13y ago
A multi-day power outage has happened to me 1 time in my 40+ years. My various internal combustion cars have failed maybe 5 or 6 times. That's a small sample size, but I suspect that overall the grid is more reliable than vehicles (electric or gas) themselves.
rdl 13y ago
Being able to use your EV to power your home in an emergency, at least low level stuff like minimal lighting and keeping the freezer frozen, might be awesome. Have a house storage battery fed by solar, too, but the EV could ferry out to pick up charge from a remote location which still has power.
CleanedStar 13y ago
From your post, I'm fairly confident that you are young enough to not have visceral memories of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis . Look at the picture of that line for gas on that web page. I can assure you that that was not an anomaly. It looked like that all over the country. There were probably cars in that gas line which did not fit into the picture. Those cars I'm sure were moving very slowly. At some point the gas station would run out of gas. Then cars would race to the next gas station. Americans are used to turning on the water faucet, and always having warm, clean water come out of it. They are used to flipping a light on, and if the switch is not flipped again, that bulb burning for weeks on end until it burns out. Once you travel outside the US, especially if it is not somewhere like western Europe or Japan, you begin to see that this is not the case in much of the world. And I'm not talking about the poorest slum in Bangladesh or deep in the Amazon, I'm talking in large cities, in locally middle class surroundings in much of the world. It gives one perspective on such things. Warm, clean water does not consistently pour out of faucets by magic, it requires an infrastructure which a great deal of the world does not have. In the same manner, political troubles, wars, natural disasters and the like have a way of stopping oil shipments. It is not until this stops unexpectedly that most people realize the fragility of such things.

by maeon3 13y ago

andrewtbham 13y ago

lack of gasoline is also a problem periodically. especially during disasters like hurricanes and massive tornados.

fancyketchup 13y ago
Add multi-day electrical outages to the list. During the Northeast Blackout in 2003 you simply could not buy gas for several days in many places because gas pumps run on, you guessed it, electricity. Actually, I think owning an EV would make me less worried about multi-day blackouts. You can charge an EV from a gas or diesel generator or solar (or wind or...), but a gas car can only run on gas.

dak1 13y ago

What's stopping you from keeping your own generator? I suppose you'd be effectively limited to the max range of your vehicle from the generator, but if there's no power for 200-300 miles then there's probably bigger problems.

andrewtbham 13y ago
or better yet... lots of people are getting solar panels from elon's other company Solar City.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jusben1369 13y ago

In the 1st world I think very few people would ding you for building a business model that relied on a predictable steady supply of electricity. Non issue.

apapli 13y ago
Couldn't agree more. Data centers anyone?
- dmoy 13y ago
  Data centers are supposed to have backup generators and systems in place to fuel them up should the need arise. Can't do the same for every house in a city. However I agree, building something that depends on the grid is not crazy. For example: TVs, computers, light bulbs, fridges, ...

bdegman 13y ago

I'm pretty sure the supercharges are hooked up to solar panels for power generation as well as the grid. I'm sure without the grid they won't be able to charge at full output but they should still work.

pavs 13y ago

If you going to think up worse case scenarios then I could think of few for gas-powered cars too. You can't be always prepared for every highly unlikely corner cases.

revelation 13y ago

It's a sad time when people seriously think it is easier to have deep-well pumped, shipped, refined, shipped again toxic substances supplied than electricity. Use the money you would take to buy your 2-stroke generator and invest it into a bunch of solar panels. Also, donate some money to your local power company, because power outages are not at all a common thing in the european half of the developed world.

grecy 13y ago

In the other HN thread on this announcement, chaz posted [1] about "contingency anxiety", which was an excellent post. You're doing exactly that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791114

tlb 13y ago

A multi-day power outage has happened to me 1 time in my 40+ years. My various internal combustion cars have failed maybe 5 or 6 times. That's a small sample size, but I suspect that overall the grid is more reliable than vehicles (electric or gas) themselves.

rdl 13y ago

Being able to use your EV to power your home in an emergency, at least low level stuff like minimal lighting and keeping the freezer frozen, might be awesome. Have a house storage battery fed by solar, too, but the EV could ferry out to pick up charge from a remote location which still has power.

CleanedStar 13y ago

From your post, I'm fairly confident that you are young enough to not have visceral memories of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis . Look at the picture of that line for gas on that web page. I can assure you that that was not an anomaly. It looked like that all over the country. There were probably cars in that gas line which did not fit into the picture. Those cars I'm sure were moving very slowly. At some point the gas station would run out of gas. Then cars would race to the next gas station. Americans are used to turning on the water faucet, and always having warm, clean water come out of it. They are used to flipping a light on, and if the switch is not flipped again, that bulb burning for weeks on end until it burns out. Once you travel outside the US, especially if it is not somewhere like western Europe or Japan, you begin to see that this is not the case in much of the world. And I'm not talking about the poorest slum in Bangladesh or deep in the Amazon, I'm talking in large cities, in locally middle class surroundings in much of the world. It gives one perspective on such things. Warm, clean water does not consistently pour out of faucets by magic, it requires an infrastructure which a great deal of the world does not have. In the same manner, political troubles, wars, natural disasters and the like have a way of stopping oil shipments. It is not until this stops unexpectedly that most people realize the fragility of such things.